The Eternal War of the Jews Against…Pigeons

[The following article, in a modified version, was previously published in my SubStack.  Apologies to bird-lovers.]

All of my grandchildren tolerate me. They adore my wife. I am their Grandpa and occasionally bestir myself to share my store of accumulated wisdom and abundant humor for their improvement and edification. She is their Bubby, who, out of unconditional, unadulterated love, engages with them, discusses their lives and interests, treats each one as an individual with individual charms and quirks, and thinks about ways to make them happy.

Ahuva is the best thing that ever happened to me.

My wife belongs to a group of grandmothers (Savta Mi’Modiin) who bake chocolate chip cookies for soldiers every Sunday. On Mondays, she goes with friends to Hatzalah in Bet Shemesh to pack emergency supply kits for first responders. On Tuesdays she attends classes at Midreshet Orot Techiya. (Attention, prospective home invaders: I am diligently on guard doing nothing while she is away. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” said Milton–or, as we call him, Moishy.)

The rest of the time, she recites tehillim for peace in Israel and the welfare of individual injured soldiers, whose names (including their mothers’ names) she knows by heart. She listens to OU’s shnayim mikra and nach yomi, as well as various educational programs on YouTube.

And she cares for and puts up with me.

If only she could get past the pigeons.

My lovely, beautiful, caring, charitable, and kind wife hates pigeons the way the Chofetz Chaim hated lashon hara, except a bit more because lashon hara didn’t crap all over the Chofetz Chaim’s balcony.

She doesn’t hate all animals. We once had an aquarium full of tropical fish until the big black one ate all the others, and then dropped dead of indigestion. We briefly had a bird, Rita Parakeeta, that died of old age while quite young, probably because of our lousy animal husbandry skills, leaving us with a great deal of bird food that we could not leave outside because . . . pigeons. I disposed of it surreptitiously, telling Ahuva that I had sold it to a passing Gentile in anticipation of Pesach.

She admires and takes pictures of the wild birds she sees on her daily morning nature walks, especially her beloved duchifat–the hoopoe.

But she is phobic and irrational when it comes to pigeons.

I try to explain to her that pigeons have a glorious history. They were prized pets, kept in carefully maintained dovecotes, providing entertainment through homing and racing contests, used as messengers between lovers, spies, and generals, eligible for sacrifice in the holy temple, and, before they became urban vermin, a good source of protein. It is said that Al Gore got his idea for the internet by watching a pigeon fly through the sky.

“If a pigeon can carry information through the ether,” he thought, “why not a massive, global system of interconnected computer networks?” While he was looking up and thinking that thought, he got a bad sunburn on his nose, which eventually led to his groundbreaking inconvenient ideas on global warming and climate change.

So the pigeon has made quite a contribution, I explained, hoping to redirect her passionate antipathy toward something constructive, like making a lukshen kugel–she used to make an amazing (salt and pepper) lukshen kugel before she was consumed by dedication to the South Beach Diet and animus toward pigeons. She learned the recipe from my mother, a”h, and subsequently adapted it because the ingredients my mother used (e.g., Crisco) no longer exist. I tell her that if she abandons this mission it will be lost to posterity.

She is unmoved, her hostility toward pigeons overwhelming the historical kugel imperative. She detests the arrogant way they look, the ponderous way they walk, the incessant, unpleasant sounds they make, and the filth they indiscriminately leave behind them. Because I share some of the same characteristics and tendencies, I finally concluded, “Better them than me.”

So I authorized (as if she required my authorization!) retaliatory action. And this mild-mannered, loving former teacher and devoted, caring present grandmother and great-grandmother, k”ah, has gone to war.

Spoiler alert: she lost, like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Napoleon at Waterloo, the Japanese at Midway, and the French at Dien Bien Phu. In other words, decisively, though the Greeks, unlike Ahuva, ultimately recovered.

On the spiritual level, she prayed with great fervor for the accelerated rebuilding of the Holy Temple, so the pigeons could again be offered as sacrifices after childbirth— and she prayed for very, very large families.

After a bit of research, she invested in an effigy of a fierce looking owl, which she had me position, at great risk to my personal safety, on top of our pergola in a place she deemed most threatening to winged intruders. When the owl finally succumbed to my shoddy engineering skills and the strong March winds of the Israeli coastal plain, departing for destinations unknown, it was covered in pigeon excrement and, somehow, despite the laws of physics and nature, had acquired a terrified, defeated expression in place of its former ferocity.

For about seven shekels, we acquired from Temu scores of otherwise useless shiny blank metallic CDs whose reflections of the sun were supposed to be highly effective in terrorizing pigeons, and suspended them like so many sukkah decorations. No luck. To avoid the glare, we were required to don sunglasses during daylight hours until the CDs joined the owl in said unknown destinations; the pigeons remained.

She tried recordings of loud noises. The neighbors objected and the pigeons danced, which seemed to stimulate their bowels.

She considered a huge mesh screen, but it would have impeded our extraordinary panoramic views of the hills surrounding Jerusalem. We declined to be incarcerated by pigeons.

After consulting a pigeon removal expert, she then settled upon the stratagem of spikes placed on the parapet, which might have been quite effective, except that, heeding the advice of said expert, they were only installed on about half the length of the wall. To her dismay, the dastardly pigeons avoided the spikes and crapped twice as much on the unspiked, unprotected, and very vulnerable wall segment.

Instead of blaming his poor planning, Ahuva’s loathing for the feathered fiends became magnified. She felt that the pigeons, somehow, were mocking her. She didn’t quite cast lots to determine the best date upon which to wipe them out, but if she knew how to cast lots, or how to wipe them out, she would have.

She would interrupt her constant recital of Psalms and her perpetual internet Torah study (taught by brilliant, high-pitched instructors) to berate pigeons who arrived to strut on outer window sills or the balcony. “Oh no, you don’t,” she would say, flapping her hands and charging the window, like some huge, crazed pigeon. “Get out of here NOW!!! You don’t belong here.” Often she would do this in Hebrew, on the theory that they were, after all, Israeli pigeons.

Lukshen kugel appears ever less likely. The pigeons patrol our parapet like sentinels (על חומותיך . . . הפקדתי שומרים), heads moving back and forth in their rhythmic, ungainly promenade, cooing their ugly guttural chant, flaunting their victory as though our walls were the Strait of Hormuz and they are the Iranian Revolutionary Pigeon Guard. Ahuva mutters.

“Bleach,” she said one day, after consulting ChatGPT, “I’ll pour bleach all over the walls and balcony. It will obliterate the smells of food and previous pigeon inhabitants that attract them. That will drive them away.” For a while, we had the cleanest, whitest, outdoor surfaces in Modi’in, and we couldn’t go outside without K-95 masks.

Then we had bleached exteriors covered with pigeon excrement.

I love my wife. Everyone loves my wife. But we need help. Not advice; advice is useless. An Irish correspondent suggested feeding them kernels of corn soaked in whiskey (and if that failed, drinking the whiskey). A Sephardic friend suggested the same, but with Arak. The pigeons partied. Someone suggested electrified wires; we draw the line at mass electrocution.

We need help.

I may never again get lukshen kugel—because of pigeons. Does anyone know where we can buy one of those Iron Dome things?

Postscript. We have ordered eight roles of reflective tape from Temu, guaranteed to terrify and repel unwanted flying visitors (“UFVs”). Stay tuned.